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Belated Anniversary

Posted on Monday, November 9, 2009

Do they make belated anniversary cards? I wanted to earn my first million once by convincing Hallmark to bring out my line of Belated Get Well cards (they considered this an extension of my humorous sympathy card line and shot me down) But if they make belated birthday…I was going to talk about something else, wasn’t I?

This blog has been running for about six months now, and if no Internet Authroity has presented me with a gold watch, at least I haven’t been run out of town for practicing literature without a license, either. Anyway, I thought I should take the opportunity to issue a few updates and addenda to my previous thoughts.

1. Banana boxes still strike people as excellent things to pack books in. The power of the Internet to change lives would seem to have been exaggerated. And I would just like to add a word to those of you who use egg crates as a substitute.

Don’t.

Egg crates, if you’ve never encountered them (I never saw one before coming to the Big City, myself) are extremely large boxes designed to carry large numbers of cartons filled with eggs. They’re roughly, oh, a mile long and half a mile high and some people think they can pack lots of books in them. You CAN pack lots of books in them. Just don’t expect me to pick one up for you after you’ve packed it. (If filled with small paperbacks only, they are relatively liftable, and very impressive, too, if you are inclined to show off by picking up big boxes of books. Wouldn’t know about that, myself.)

2. One of the Mrs. Mallowmars came in with three boxes of books just after I had written about the late Mr. Mallowmar. None of his books seem to have been included, so maybe her collection of his books, at least, has been cleaned away.

3. In my list of books I’m rather apathetic about receiving, I did not mention books that have been mouse-chewed, but I think I will now, having run into four boxes where there were mistakeable signs that someone thought Les Brown’s motivational book would make good nesting material. I know, I know: if the books have been sitting in the garage for ten years, you don’t want to check right down to the bottom and see if the box is swollen with mold or has been sub-let. But I do not intend to argue ownership of a box of books with a mouse, and bringing me any collections where one user of the collection has taken up residence is just a waste of your time. (For the record, no one has ever brought me a box of books with a mouse in it, living or dead. I’m still getting over the box of books that hissed at me, though. That one had been in the attic for a while, and a bat had curled up in it for the winter. I quietly carried the box of books outside and left it there for 24 hours. The bat was gone in the morning. I always assumed he flew away to warmer quarters, but someone has since suggested that a miscreant could have come along and STOLEN my bat. It is indeed a wicked, wicked world.)

4. Thank you for asking but no, rather to my surprise, I have not run out of stories about books yet. I don’t think I’ve even found all the old Book Fair songs yet. And as I recall, somewhere in the eighties there was a story about Bookman and Pamphlet, who rode around Chicagio in the Bookmobile rescuing unloved books. When you see that one here, you’ll know I’ve reached the bottom of the barrel and have started scraping through.

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